The advertising industry in the UK is worth £18.3 billion a year. The industry employs thousands of talented intelligent creative artists, directors and executives. If they haven’t been working in the industry for decades, then they are fresh graduates who have spent years studying the industry. You might be thinking what any of this has to do with guest posts. Before I carry on, let’s take a step back to blogging 101.
It’s a mantra; there are five tried and tested ways to grow your blog audience. If you don’t know what they are then you are one step ahead of the herd. Unfortunately anyone who has done any research on blogging can tell you what the magic formula is composed of; content, social media, commenting, guest post and interviews and link exchange.
Step forwards my last guest post with Changes in Longitude. I spent hours on this article. It’s full of imagery, colorful words and beautiful photographs. You get the picture… Now back to the advertising industry. How much of a return do you think advertisers get on their investment? With £18.3 billion on the line you’d expect something. So here it is, £16.3 billion is pissed against the wall. Consumers simply don’t notice 89% of adverts.
That 89%, that included my guest post. I got a grand total of 8 people visit the site on the day of publication. So what did I do wrong and what can you learn from this?
Target Your Audience
Did I do this? Sure I scanned through Changes in Longitude, but when I proposed a guest post, I chose something that fitted with my interests and experiences and not the average interest of someone who visits the website. If I had thought about this before, would I have proposed a guest post about some obscure backwater of Indonesia to an audience that is in all probability predominantly middle aged and come from the US? F#%k no! What I did was like trying to sell cardigans to a group of ghetto kids and the result was a monumental failure.
The second thing that I did wrong was an even bigger blunder than my first mistake. I spent about three times the amount of time producing great content for someone else’s website. Now creating great content for someone else’s website is not a problem. The problem is that you need to have the great content on your site as well. If I’m spending more time on the posts for other people’s sites than I do on my own site, then not only is my audience missing out, but people coming from other sites will be dissapointed.
Well, that’s my thoughts on guest posting for this week. What is your experience with guest posting. Any useful tips?
